Savvy Cows Know It, and So Should You: USE MOR MOBL

Maybe you’ve seen those cute billboards for Chick-fil-A in which 3-D spotted cows team up to scrawl messages around the theme, “EAT MOR CHIKIN.”

Judging by this report from Business Insider, chikin – uh, chicken – has indeed been making a big move on quick-serve restaurants’ menus, even among brands known more for hamburgers or Mexican food. Instead of cute cows writing on billboards, the article cites lower wholesale prices for chicken as a key driver of the trend.

But QSR brands need to get it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, if they really want to understand what consumers think about their menu items, and why they buy or don’t buy. Have you noticed that nearly every human does a great deal of talking into a smartphone – often in the midst of a meal? If you want horse’s-mouth consumer insights on QSRs or any other product or vertical, in-app mobile surveys are the way to go. In a nutshell, here’s why:

Panel fraud has reached pandemic proportions for online surveys, and the last thing you need is infected data.

Buying online panel without full transparency that allows you to be absolutely sure of its sourcing and representativeness is a recipe for being defrauded or, best case scenario, having to weight your data heavily in an attempt to compensate for a dearth of completes from the demographic groups you need.

Each smartphone has a unique ID, which assures you that you’re talking to real, validated, individual consumers and not fraudsters who double-dip or fail to truly engage with a survey.

In-app mobile is the only mobile method that matters. “Mobile optimized” surveys that are taken on phones are really online surveys by other means, because they require respondents to follow a link to a questionnaire that puts them online, where dropped connections or slow loading times often make survey-taking an off-putting grind instead of an engaging opportunity for consumers to be heard while getting paid.

With in-app mobile studies, all your questions load instantly into respondents’ phones, enabling them to complete the questionnaire offline, where there are no connectivity issues. Just as important, those evil survey bots that lurk online have no way of preying on an offline, in-app survey.

Back to the chikin, er, chicken.

Is price really the leading driver that’s landing more poultry on QSR grills and fryers? It’s a reasonable inference, but why assume when you can get answers from actual mobile consumers whose purchases you’ve validated by asking them to use their phones to photograph and submit their receipts?

Does it make sense to survey a QSR customer a week, or even a few days, after the meal you need to ask about? Do you remember what you had for lunch the day before yesterday? Or even where you bought it?

The antidote to recall bias is a GeoLocation-driven survey that captures Point-of-Emotion® insights from consumers while they’re ordering or eating, or just after they’ve left a restaurant with their takeout orders.

You can’t count your sales before they hatch – but you can do advance mobile testing of ad content across any channel, to give you the best chance to make your campaign lay golden eggs.

The latest innovation is testing mobile social ads by injecting them into target audience members’ actual news feeds to passively measure how they engage with them, followed by a survey to measure brand and product awareness and intent to shop. Consumers also will tell you what about your ad is working, or not working – and why.

And yes, you can GeoLocate and survey actual mobile consumers who’ve been exposed to any billboards, including ones that might feature cute critters making appeals to our sympathies and senses of humor.

We could go on and on about the advantages of in-app mobile research, but we’ve made ourselves hungry, and it’s time for lunch (today it’s a cow product, but don’t fret, billboard bovines – it’s only yogurt). To sum up: USE MOR MOBL. And to learn more, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.